Abstract: | Much progress has been made in high‐performance electronic chips, the miniaturization of electronic circuits and other compact systems recently, which brings about a great demand for developing efficient heat removal techniques to accommodate these high heat fluxes. With this objective in mind, experiments were carried out on five kinds of test elements with distilled water and ethanol as working liquids. The test elements used in these experiments consisted of five parallel discs with diameters varying from 5 mm to 40 mm. The experiments were performed with the discs oriented horizontally and uniform heat fluxes applied at the bottom surfaces. The influence of narrow spacing, space size, working liquid property, and heat flux on boiling heat transfer performance in narrow spaces has been investigated. Experimental results showed that the boiling heat transfer coefficient of a narrow space was 3 to 6 times higher than that of pool boiling when the narrow space size and heat flux combine adequately, but the critical heat flux was lower than that of pool boiling. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res, 33(5): 307–315, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/htj.20017 |